HW 7C

Chapter 16

Precis

The anatomy of the human digestive system is marvelous. It lets us eat a variety of food. Compared to the very picky Kaola Bear, who only eats eucalyptus leaves. Because of the thousands of immigrants in US, there is no one traditional food. So there is not nationwide food that everyone likes. This makes marketing companies's job a lot easier. Americans don't have their minds set to one type of food. They will eat everything that tastes good. That is the omnivore's dillema, they have too much choices. They cannot decide between healthy and cheap.

Gems

“Meanwhile, the kids, and Dad, too, if he’s around, each fix something different for themselves, because Dan’s on a low-carb diet, the teenager’s become a vegetarian, and the eight-year-old is on a strict ration of pizza that the shrink says it’s best to indulge (lest she develop eating disorders later on in life)."

Thoughts

Michael Pollan has changed the food habits of many many people. But those people are almost insignificant to the number of people who follow the commands of the big industrial marketing people. What the people need is a man (or woman) of power who can motivate the people to a different level. If only there was a person who was elected to govern the people by the people...

Chapter 15

Precis

I have educated my self first hand with the food from industrial farms and organic farms. Now it is time I must learn about the last category of food. Food that is hunted by me. I have never gone hunting in my life. In America, hunting is more of a recreational sport that you do with your dad. My dad was more of an indoor type guy so he never taught me anything related to hunting or foraging. Fortunately, I had met a man called Angelo who would be helping me through my journey of finding out everything about where food really comes from.

Gems

“…you have to have had a certain kind of dad in order to join the culture of hunting in America, and mine, one of the great indoorsmen, was emphatically not that dad. My father looked upon hunting as a human activity that had stopped making sense with the invention of the steakhouse.”

Thoughts

This Chapter gave us a little bit of insight into Pollan's life as a kid. Especially with the mention of his father. I finally understand why he is doing all these studies and experiments to understand where food comes from. It is not to make money from writing a book or making a documentary. It is to educate people so that people who grew up with parents like his, but aren't open minded enough to do the studies themselves. It is a study meant for lazy people who are willing to accept the truth only if people tell it to them but they will never go out to find it for themselves.

Chapter 14

Precis

After my experience in Salatin's farm, I decide to make a meal for my friends. The healthiest and the most delicious meal I can make. Fortunately, my friends like the food. That would be an understatement, they loved the food. I dedicated the dinner to the chickens that I bought from Salatin's farm. Without the chickens, my friends and I would not have the pleasure to enjoy this wonderful meal.

Gems

“One of the reasons we cook meat (besides making it tastier and easier to digest) is to civilize, or sublimate, what is at bottom a fairly brutal transaction between animals.”

Thoughts

After reading this Chapter, all I wanted to do was visit the country side and get some chicken and ask my mom to re-create Pollan's meal. But alas, with me living in the city, going to a Polyface farm is near impossible. It will probably be a 3 hour drive one way. One day, I will go to a Polyface farm and maybe then I will truly understand the beauty of organic food. Why not just go to an organic market here in the city? Like Salatin says, if you want the truly pure food from the farm, you gotta go down and get it.

Chapter 13

Precis

Salatin has a strict code of conduct; never to feed food that has been genetically modified, meaning, corn. Salatin believes that food should never be shipped cross country. This uses up fossil fuels that could be used for something else. Even though Satalin's food may look more expensive than super market food, it really isn't. With supermarket food you need to deal withthe cost of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water.

Gems

"Oh, those beautiful eggs! The difference is night and day- the color and richness and fat content. There's just no comparison. I always have to adjust my recipes for these eggs- you never need as many as they call for."

Thoughts

The consumers should always know where their food is coming from. The problem with industries is that the meat that they process is never just one animal. Beef for example, a hamburger sold in McDonald's won't contain meat from only one cow, it will always be a mixture of 5-6. This increases the chances of diseases spreading from the cattle to consumers.

Chapter 12

Precis

Today was the day. It was my turn to experience first hand what it is like to slaughter an animal. Many of Salatin's neighbors showed up to help with the slaughtering of the animals so it was more like a family activity rather than a job. It was hard for me to first get used to it. I tried not to look at the animals that I was given to kill. But once or twice I would glance at their eyes and I would only see fear. The chickens were placed upside down in cones so they would be calm and I was supposed to slit their throats. The chickens were later placed into a dumbed down version of a centrifuge where they are cleaned and their feathers plucked. After all the chickens are slaughtered and cleaned, they are placed on a separate section of the farms where people from all over the county showed up to pick up their healthy meat.

Gems

-“We do not allow the government to dictate what religion you can observe, so why should we allow them to dictate what kind of food you can buy.”

-"Make no mistake, we're in a war with the bureaucrats, who would like nothing better than to put us out of business."

Thoughts

Pollan's description of his first time slaughtering an animal was simply stunning. It made me actually imagine my self standing in his place and doing the things that he thought he was never capable of doing. Some people may argue as to why they should buy organic because the animals have the same result as industrial animals. They get slaughtered brutally. To them I say, it is not how their life ends that matter, it is how their life was that truly makes the difference in the end.

Chapter 11

Precis

Efficiency is everything in Joel Salatin's farm. What we consider early is time being wasted to the workers at Salatin's farm. Everything in the farm works in a cycle and in order. Chickens feed from broilers and their feces helps the grass grow, which the cow eats and the cow's feces also helps the grass grow which more cows/pigs can feed on.

Gems

“One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.”

Thoughts

Industrial farms are cheap but they harm the environment and their consumers at a rate that is unthinkable and food from Salatin's farm costs considerably more but is very healthy and good for the environment.

HW 7B

Chapter 10

Precis

It is sad to see that organic farms like Salatin's are going to eventually become non existent. But for the time being, Salatin is an excellent idol for farmers every where. Farmers who care about healthy living rather than living lavishly. Without using any modern technology, Salatin is able to re-create farming the way it is meant to be done, the way farmers did it 20,000 years ago. Farms such as Salatin's are rare now because of the high cost of maintaining a farm of that caliber with no help from the government. It is only logical to have an industrial farm because of all the more money you could be making.

Gems

“…if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road.”

Thoughts

The fact that government endorsed farms are affecting the environment so drastically is nothing short of repulsing. Companies that own the industrial farms need to wake up and realize that this planet is not theirs. They cannot just help destroy it so while they live, they can have fun and the people after them will need to suffer their consequences.

Chapter 9

Precis

Organic farming has spread from little groups of farmers to industries. These industries are a lot cleaner and healthier for both the animals and the people. The companies that own the industries charge the consumers more than the CAFO meat but less than Polyface farm owners such as Joel Salatin. The organic food industry is an $11 billion business. As more and more people are becoming health conscious, organic food is spreading to TV dinners and "fancy" restaurants. The animals that are slaughtered in industrial organic farms, are fed on natural grass so they aren't exposed to any GMOs hence no bacteria in their system that would need pesticides or antibiotics.

Gem

“So it happens that these organic blackberries perched on this mound of vanilla ice cream, having been grown in a complexly fertile soil and forced to fight their own fights against pests and disease, are in some quantifiable way more nutritious than conventional blackberries.”

Thoughts

As the world becomes more and more technologically advanced, farms like Salatin's will start to disappear. With population booming with it the demand for fresh meat as well, Salatin's manual labor will never be able to keep up with the high demand. Even determined people like Salatin will eventually need to give up and hand their land over to industries. I don't think they will ever hand it over to CAFO endorsed companies but they will to organic factories.

Chapter 8

Precis

We looked at the industrial side of the food industry, now we will be looking at the organic side or also known as the "good side". Specifically a Polyface farm in Virgina owned by one of the few traditional farmers in US, Joel Salatin. Salatin is disgusted by how government endorsed "farmers" operate. The very idea of the workers in CAFOs makes Salatin angry. All of Salatin's cattle and chicken feed on grass instead of corn. The process is very natural and environmentally clean. The cows feed on the grass, their manure has fertilizers which help the grass grow again. The chicken feed on the maggots and worms that grow around the cow manure. Thanks to this natural process, the animals never need to be exposed to any special chemicals used to kill bacteria that would normally stick to their skin in an industrial feed lot.

Gem

-“Polyface Farm stands about as far from this industrialized sort of agriculture as it is possible to get without leaving the planet.”

Thoughts/Questions

One question that Pollan never answered was why Salatin refused to send a sample of meat from his farm to him through FedEx. I think Salatin did this so that he would keep to his policy, he wouldn't break his ethics even for a journalist who might give his farm a lot of positive attention. Shipping meat cross country will use up fossil fuels and he also wants to keep his meat local, instead of it spreading all over the world because people would not understand his logic. Pollan portrays Salatin as one of the "good farmers" because his cattle and chickens have a "good life". Even though the animals are still slaughtered, they had a chance to live life like they were meant to by nature.

Chapter 7

Precis

One in three kids in USA eat from a fast food restaurant everyday. One of the most popular fast food chains around the globe is McDonald's. In 1983, McDonald's came with their ingenious and world renown McNuggets. Chicken McNuggets are 56% corn which includes the corn the chicken was fed on also including thirteen other ingredients made purely from corn. It also includes a corn based ingredient called TBHQ. Which if taken without paying heed to the amount, it could be lethal.

Gems

-TBHQ can cause nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse. Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

-Why do americans not realize how much corn is infused into our lives?

Thoughts

As most kids, I loved McDonald's. It was sort of a treat for me every time my parents would announce, "Dinner at McDonald's!" The greasy food of McDonald's was heaven for me and I would behave a whole month just so we can go again to the fat paradise. If I knew how unhygienic it was and how unhealthy it is, I would have never entered that place to begin with.

Chapter 6

Precis

Today's craving for corn is very similar to the alcohol craving in the nineteenth century. They are both the result of problem. Over production. In both time periods, the over production of the two substances has led to overnutrition, malnutrition, Type 2 diabetes, and various other health and environmental complications. According to history and the present, if one specific type of food becomes easily available, its value will dramatically decrease.

Gems

"The human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes evolutionary sense... Our bodies are storing reserves of fat against a famine that never comes."

Thoughts

In general, most people do not have a lot of self control and I do not understand why that is. I myself do not have a lot of self control. Even after thousands of years, evolution still hasn't made us to learn self control. People buy fast fatty foods because they like it even though they know it is unhealthy. The day mankind is able to control its desires, the world will be a much better and healthier place. Both physically and mentally.

HW 7

The following precis includes my insight on the book, "The Omnivores's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.

Chapters 1 and 2

The first two was chapters of this very intriguing book focused primarily on corn. It talks about the continuing and mostly like unstoppable rise of the the wonderful crop through western culture and the deep impact it has had on our daily lives. Corn is every where, "If we are indeed what we eat, we are corn" After reading about the amazing journey of corn through the past hundreds of years, I could not help but think about the many people that always say, "I hate corn!" I was amazed at how absurd that statement actually is; because if that is truly the case, then that person basically hates every food product that was made in a factory in USA. Another sentence that was a particular gem was, "A notably unhealthy country obsessed with eating healthy." That sentence summarized American culture astonishingly well and made me realized how very flawed this country really is in even everyday affairs like food.

Chapter 3

Corn has fallen from its seat of royalty but it still has the same value. Corn is being produced in an incredibly high yield that the grain elevators can no longer accommodate it. No matter what kind of corn it is, it is piled up by the elevated as golden mounds of grain ready to be shipped too all over the country and beyond. Workers work tirelessly to try and utilize all the corn for maximum efficiency, all 10 billion bushels of it. Thanks to over production of corn, many farm animals who previously weren't corn consumers have no other choice but to accept it.

Chapter 4

Precis

Corn fields in the USA take up more land than New York State. The pungent odor of one of the feedlots can be smelt from many a mile away. The animal wastes that used to serve as a natural fertilizer in farms is now being used to spread diseases among not just the farm animals but humans as well. The cows often eat their own feces along with that of their bretherin. The bacteria that cow consumed will also be consumed by the kid in McDonald's who wanted a hamburger instead of the snack wrap.

Gems

"'Hell, if you gave them lots of grass and space, I wouldn't have a job.'"

Insight

The healthier way is always the inefficient and more costly way. The cows are looked at as if they are just products, like cardboard in a paper factory. If one of them is deformed they are just cast aside. They are all just numbers in a industrial machine. There is no respect for the other species of the world anymore.

Chapter 5

Precis

Corn is one of the most important aspect in our everyday lives. The corn is hardly ever seen in the form of a kernel anymore. Every part of it is processed and artificially engineered to make it into an ingredient in almost every type of food that we like to enjoy. The very existence of natural food is being changed my scientists. Almost every type of food sold in stores nowadays is being changed and new ingredients are being added to make some use of the incredibly over production of corn. High fructose corn syrup is something that is pure poison but yet food companies continue to add it to the products that people continue to consume on a daily basis.

Gems

- "It takes a certain kind of eater- an industrial eater- to consume these fractions of corn, and we are, or have evolved into, that supremely adapted creature: the eater of processed food."

- "There's money to be made in food, unless you're trying to grow it."

General Thoughts and Questions

I follow Alex Jones a lot and he has some very interesting things to say about food. He jokingly made a petition where he asked the food companies to change the name "high fructose corn syrup" to "cancer corn". He was very serious about it because this "cancer corn" is in all of the soft drinks that teenagers consume litters after litters every day. I wonder if open minded people like Alex Jones will ever get their wish and actually be able to stop the food companies from destroying our lives...

HW 6 - Food Diary

Day 1

Lunch: 3 piece chicken tenders with fries from Popeye's

Like every other fast food restaurant, Popeye's food have more calories than home cooked food. The reason I went to Popeye's that day instead of another place such as Subway, was because my friend said that she had a sudden craving for Popeye's chicken so we all ended up going there. The taste of Popeye's chicken was the same as any other fast food places', greasy but delicious. For some people, eating in fast food restaurants is more of a habit than a random choice. I saw a lot of people that I see every time I go to that Popeye's branch. For me however, I really don't care where I go for lunch, I even consider going to the school cafeteria just because I feel too lazy to go outside. Food is food. As long it isn't spoilt or po

isoned, I don't really care how it tastes. But for the people that have extra picky tongues, I think they always need to go to one place or eat one type of food because that is how their brain works and my brain works differently.

Yellow is the worldwide accepted color to represent food or hunger. Restaurants all over the world use the color yellow to lure their customers in and one thing that I realized about Popeye's for the first time on that day was that everything in that place is yellow or a shade of yellow. Yellow also represents warmth, sunshine, cheer, and happiness. These forms of subliminal messages are being used by food companies all around the world to attract their customers and make them more money.

Dinner: Rice, fish, lentil, and various spices.

My typical and favorite meal. Every night that my mom servers this meal, is a good night for me. I'll stay in a good mood and I also noticed that it sometimes helps me focus because I'm not pondering over what I had for dinner since it's so simple. I'm not quite sure what the calorie count for this meal is specifically but I'm sure it's not too high. This meal has a fair amount of carbohydrates because of the rice but it also has a lot of protein from the fish (or chicken some nights). Lentil and spices are just there for flavor.

Day 2:

Lunch: Vegetable Burrito

I wouldn't normally eat a vegetable burrito, but I had to pack some sort of lunch for my internship so this was the best I could come up with. This turned out to be a good choice because I could carry it without hassle. Nutritionally, this was also a good choice. I had some rice, spinach, beans, and potatoes in it and it tasted fantastic. Overall, I felt good about this lunch because it was not only tasty but also very healthy. Typically, American style burritos are large and stuffed with a lot of ingredients. I don't like those types of burritos because they are usually full of grease and they are also hard to manage. I think a lot of people like those better than my style because they allow you to eat a lot of stuff at the same type instead of taking it slow and actually enjoying what they are eating.

HW 5 - Dominant Discourses Regarding Contemporary Foodways in the U.S.

Food has been in discourses for decades, but the discussions have reached a new precedent in the last 5 years. Eating healthy is the dominant discourse right now, and has been for as long as I can remember. There have always been TV shows showing the different types of food that you can eat to lose weight or to maintain a good cholesterol level. I have never seen a show that tells people to eat more so they can be unhealthy. Surprisingly enough, even though the major discourse has been to make people eat healthy food, the rates of obesity have increased astonishingly over the past five years. The average percentage of people with obesity per state in the year 2004, was 20-24 (link). That number drastically increased to 25%-29% in 2009 (link). As to why I think this is, I do not think that this is because people do not listen. It is mostly because of the economy. Fast food restaurants are cheaper and quicker, so why should people spend more money and time on healthy food?

People aren’t usually taken seriously if they don’t posses the qualities that qualifies a person as an “expert”. You have to have a college degree, because other wise, you are just dumb. Yet surprisingly there many people such as Dhirubhai Ambani, who was a High School dropout but now is a billionaire businessman. So if a college degree doesn’t really make smarter, then why aren’t dropouts taken seriously? Is it because
“PhD” looks better in the captions then “Personal Experience”? Is that why maybe the movie Super Size Me wasn’t a big success? Morgan Spurlock, the writer and the actor in the movie, tries to understand the influence of the fast food industry by exploring the consequences of a diet consisting of only McDonald’s food for one month. He nearly died making the movie and was awarded with 5 Oscars for “unveiling the lies that the fast food restaurants tell us”, yet because of some bizarre reason, the fast food industry kept on booming and made Spurlock’s movie as useless as any other movie.

The main stream media is the dominant power in the discourse. They have been trying to “influence” peoples’ lives for as look as it has existed. Their main purpose is not to tell people about the things that can affect the public’s lives, as was the original plan, but to tell people how to live their lives. There isn’t a single person in the United States that doesn’t know the health risks of eating in fast food restaurants or eating junk foods. Everyone here, thanks to the media, are very well informed about everything that’s going on around them. “Everyone knows that you shouldn’t eat junk food and you should exercise, but the environment makes it so difficult that fewer people can do these things, and then you have a public health catastrophe.” (Brownell) Brownell has a doctorate in psychology, is among a number of leading researchers who are proposing large-scale changes to food pricing, advertising and availability. She is the obvious “expert” in healthy eating and people would listen to her. According to Brownell, people cannot start living a healthier life style unless their environment changes. She is obviously referring to the fact that the streets of most of the major states in US are littered with fast food restaurants. Since fast food is a trillion dollar industry, it is highly unlikely that fast food restaurant owners will just shut down because they want their nation to be healthier. Only other solution; move to a place with no fast food restaurants. There isn’t a single state or single county even in the US that doesn’t have a fast food restaurant. So is the “expert” suggesting that the only way we can live better is by leaving the country?

RE: HW 4 - Your Families' Foodways

In my family, food is considered a blessing, its not necessarily sacred, but it’s something that should be honored and not taken for granted. This has been one of my family’s foodways for generations. According to my dad, the same foodways that we follow today was followed by my great grand parents from both sides and passed down to my grand parents from both sides and then passed down to my parents. I am expected to pass it down as well to my kids as to keep the tradition alive in my family at least.

The reason why my parents expect me to pass the tradition down is because everyone Bangladesh are very traditional. It doesn't matter who you are, you will eat the same thing. Farmers to government officials. Beggars to business men. In Bangla, there is a word used to explain this, rucchi. Rucchi means something like habits but only related to food. Bengali's say that a their rucchi can never change, no matter where they go, they will always crave for rice with lentil and chicken.

Most of the food I eat is cooked. I have almost never eaten raw food except some rare occasion with friends outside of school, but never with my parents. Each and every type of food in my house is cooked and prepared with the utmost care. When my mom gets into the kitchen, its as if shes in a zone and no one better disturb her. One more thing that's part of the Bengali rucchi is spices. All our food must be cooked with proper spices grown from the ground. My mom tried artificial spices ones but it just tasted disgusting to me. If any of my regular meals doesn't have proper spices, it doesn't taste good. This rarely ever happens because my mom is a terrific cook.

By living in New York, I have gotten used to eating all the different kinds of food that is available here: Chinese, Italian, French, Greek, and many many others. I will never mind eating any of these food but I don't think I can ever survive on them for a month straight. I will crave for my Bengali food and end up going to a Bengali restaurant. I know for a fact that my parents would never survive on other types of food for a month straight. And as for my grand parents and my great grand parents, they probably wouldn't survive a week.

HW 3

As our class took an educational trip to Taco Bell, as I was walking through Taco Bell, I tried to see things that I wouldn't normally notice. Since it was midday on a week day, there weren't too many people sitting and eating. I looked around to see that there weren't many staff members there either, this was weird, after all, it was midday on a week day. As I was moving around the restaurant trying to build a mental image in my head, I noticed all the different signs of how the Taco Bell food is irresistibly mouth watering and also unbelievably cheap! Since fast food restaurants are usually cheap, a lot of young people go there. The money high school students get from their parents are usually enough to buy food from places like Taco Bell or McDonalds. High school students also have less free time than adults and fast food restaurants are just perfect for them. Young people also have a higher metabolism rate than older people do so digesting fast food is a lot easier for them. Fast food targets old people less because of their inability, their weak body, and their smaller income. In conclusion, young people eat more fast food than old people do.

Fast food contains a lot of cholesterol, which increases the rate of heart attacks and high blood pressure, especially in old people. I definitely prefer fast food because of all the reasons that are posted in the first paragraph and also because like almost every other teen, I prefer taste over health. People in general usually like to eat what they like and it is very unlikely that this behavior will change just because it is a health risk. Alas, there is still hope, humans evolve and we might be able to fight our urges to eat tasty food over healthier food.